August 2023

At a well-run seed stage startup, engineers will often describe the work experience as intoxicating. At a larger company, the best you get is “enjoyable”. Why does this happen? Is it inevitable?

Let’s inspect what makes a startup intoxicating. An engineer should spend most of their time in
this core loop:

1. If needed, talk to users, figure out their problems.
2. Come up with an idea to build.
3. If needed, discuss the idea with coworkers.
4. Implement the idea.
5. Cross fingers and ship. Celebrate or postmortem. Then go back to step 1.

At <10 people, each of these steps can be fun.

1. You can just directly reach out to users you’re interested in and grab a beer with them.
2. If you find an idea that you think is both valuable to the company and interesting to you, you
   can just drop everything to work on it.
3. Almost any coworker will be interested in discussing this idea with you because:
   1. They have skin in the game. If your idea is good, they benefit from encouraging you to take
      it on. If your idea is bad, they benefit from explaining what’s wrong. They may even care as
      users themselves.
   2. They might want to work with you on it.
   3. They can likely offer useful insights since everyone’s familiar with a significant chunk of
      the codebase.
4. Implementation is quick.
   1. Choose whatever tools you want, no security review.
   2. Small codebase. Can hold the whole thing in your head, so you feel comfortable making
      sweeping refactors. Fast hot reload, so can do quick trial-error debugging.
   3. Merge changes quick. No slow tests in CI. No need for blocking PR review for safe changes.
      Maybe just push to master. For unsafe changes, just tap coworker on shoulder for PR review.
   4. If not too many users, can tolerate downtime to make breaking backend/database changes
      quickly.
5. Anything is possible! Maybe this will make your equity worth something. Maybe people will be
   building upon this feature for years to come, maybe you’ll be seen as a visionary in the history
   books. Maybe you’ll attend a party with your users and hear them say “you came up with this
   idea? OMG it saved my life”. Because everyone in the team has skin in the game, they’re al